Manthia Diawara will provide an analysis of the films of Abderrhamane Sissako and Haroun Mahat Saleh

Professor Manthia Diawara is a writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist, scholar and art historian. He is a professor of comparative literature at New York University and his areas of research/interest include Black American film, literary and cultural studies, and black film in Africa and Europe. Professor Diawara is also director of NYU’s Institute of African-American Affairs and affiliated faculty in the Africana Studies Program, which offers a multicontinental and interdisciplinary approach to the study of black culture, literature and politics.

A native of Mali, Diawara received his education in France and later traveled to the United States for his university studies and earned his PhD from Indiana University. He has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World (2003), Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics and Spectatorship (1993), African Cinema: Politics and Culture (1992), In Search of Africa (1998), and African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics (Prestel, 2010). He has published widely on the topic of film and literature of the Black Diaspora. Diawara also collaborated with Ngûgî wa Thiong’o in making the documentary Sembene Ousmane: The Making of the African Cinema, and directed the German-produced documentary Rouch in Reverse. Other films include Maison Tropicale and Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation.